


broad daylight

by triggernometry



Category: Flight Rising
Genre: Biskbrill, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-10-12 17:34:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17471924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triggernometry/pseuds/triggernometry
Summary: An old flame comes back from the dead.





	broad daylight

[Buckshot](http://flightrising.com/main.php?p=lair&id=2226&tab=dragon&did=18709207)'s in the merchants' town of Biskbrill, this time as one of its customers and not as a seller. She's usually more efficient on these occasions, but something about the day makes her want to take her time perusing, even while she's got a clear list in her head of what she needs. It's nothing too exciting, of course: a few new tools and bait types for more creative hunting through the oncoming dry season, and a new pick for Rotgut's hooves. She rounds the trip off with a visit to Selgenue.

Selgenue used to be one cooking pot with a halfhearted half-a-tent flap over it just barely within spitting distance of Biskbrill, selling bowls of boiled amaranth slathered in sticky blacktongue pepper sauce. These days it's housed in a converted leisure caravan with a real – if small – kitchen and a smattering of chairs and tables under a tarpaulin roof stretching from one side. The menu's grown along with the locale, offering ranthpones – pan-fried lumps of amaranth bread in sizes varying from reasonable to less so – alongside the amaranth porridge mainstay, as well as a few other sides (their fried locusts being Buckshot's personal favourite).

Selgenue sits in the prime spot of the Goosetongue, the miscellanies shopping hub on the easternmost edge of Biskbrill. The Goosetongue is wedge-shaped, with good access to the Wasteland from its pointy end and easy access to the heart of Biskbrill on its fat end. Selgenue's square on the fat end, luring in customers from all corners with its busy, brightly-coloured exterior and the smell of ranthpones frying on grease-slathered iron.

Buckshot orders her usual – crunchy ranthpone with extra locusts, seeing as the black blizzards are freshly over and the locusts are as fat and good as they're ever gonna be until next year – and stuffs some of her leftover coins into the tip jar on the ordering counter, earning herself a smile from the young mirror taking orders.

She moves aside to make room for the next patron and takes up a decent leaning perch between Selgenue and the closest neighbour opposite the outdoor sitting area, a small weapons trader and crafter who's been around Biskbrill a good while now.

“Business slowin' down on you, Buck?” the weapons trader, Sherbrooke, asks. He's [a burly tundra](http://flightrising.com/main.php?p=lair&id=2226&tab=dragon&did=43510243) altogether _too_ resplendent in gold and blue to pick out the stippling of his fur. Near as Buckshot can tell, he is always _keenly_ aware of just how good he looks. Buckshot's never sure how he has the time left over to make his knives once he's done whatever he has to do to get his mane looking like that in this climate.

Buckshot turns enough to look at him over her shoulder. He flashes her a grin, showing off the gold etchings and lapis lazuli chips set in his canines. She touches the brim of her hat in greeting.

“Just the opposite, point'a fact. Sold damn near everything I came with last week,” Buckshot says. It's not entirely a lie, just an embellished truth: she'd got in early on everyone's year-end spending itch and sold the bulk of her fresh wares and enough of the hides and novelty belt buckles besides to make her purse comfortably fat. “You didn't see me with the lines windin' all around the Tongue?”

“Must've missed that.”

“Well, look up from that mirror of yours now an' again an' you might just learn a thing or two about how the business is made,” Buckshot says with a grin.  

Sherbrooke laughs and gives her a helpless can-you-blame-me shrug. There's a lull in the conversation as a potential customer wanders by, eyeing Sherbrooke's foremost wares, but they wander away again before Sherbrooke can launch into his butter-couldn't-melt wind-up pitch. Sherbrooke watches them go for a bit, and then his face goes from softly contemplative to curious on a coin.

“Now _there's_ some fancy,” he says, inclining his head towards some point behind Buckshot.

She turns, scanning the milling crowd. Her eye catches on something gold just beyond the fat end of the Goosetongue: a shock of hair uncovered by hat or scarf and the colour of sun-ripened wheat. The hair belongs to an imperial, who stands a good head over most of the dragons around them, even while they're half hunched to talk to somebody Buckshot can't quite see beside them. Gold flashes at their ears – great big medallions – and along their wings, which are folded high to take up less space in the crowd.

“Didn't figure you took hair for legal tender,” Buckshot says, provoking an amused snort from behind her.

“It ain't just the hair,” Sherbrooke says. “That one ain't some scruffy runabout. I bet they got all their teeth _and_ clean nails besides.”

The imperial in the crowd nods to whoever they're talking to and straightens up, turning to scan the crowd a little farther down into the Goosetongue, giving her a good look at their face. Their impossibly _familiar_ face. Buckshot's mouth dries up and her heart scrambles to its feet and kicks against her breastbone with all of its strength.

“Hard to tell if that one's here for business or pleasure,” Sherbrooke says, from approximately three hundred miles away. “What you figure, Buck?”

The imperial starts moving, very slowly picking their way through the crowd toward the Goosetongue.

“Crunchy ‘pone with extra locusts!” The skinny little mirror who'd taken Buckshot's order leans out from the back door of Selgenue with a lotus of folded papers in her hand, damn near startling the soul right out of Buckshot. She takes the food with hands that don't quite feel her own, like her head's a balloon on a string and floating farther away from her body with every second. The ranthpone is almost painfully hot even wrapped up in layers of paper, but she doesn't mind: it gives her something to focus on other than the slam of the pulse in her neck.

“I gotta go,” she says, pulling the brim of her hat down low and turning back toward Sherbrooke.

“Mother's tears, Buck,” he says. “You look a little green in the nares.”

“Allergies,” Buckshot says reflexively. “Next time, Sherbrooke.”

“Next time.”

Buckshot ignores the note of hesitation in Sherbrooke's voice and cuts across the front of his stall, heading for the pointy end of the Goosetongue. She sticks close to the shops, weaving in and out of browsing customers, picking up speed until she's near to running through the last few stalls at the end of the Tongue and out into the Wasteland bumping up against Biskbrill on the other side.

“Buckshot?”

The voice is terribly, painfully familiar. Buckshot does _not_ turn around.  She just keeps moving forward. Her wagon and Rotgut are waiting a dozen yards away from the edge of Biskbrill, the Wastebred giving a half-dead shrub a run for its few remaining leaves. Buckshot practically flies toward her and clambers up into the seat of the wagon faster than if a hungry poxhound were on her tail.

“Buck!” Louder now, with an undercurrent of heavy footfalls striking the ground at speed.

Something touches Buckshot's leg as she climbs up and tries to get herself situated on the wagon. A hand. Buckshot flings the bundle of papers and ranthpone in the general direction of _away_ , freeing up her hand to make a reflexive grab for her sidearm. She turns to look back the way she came, revolver at the ready.

[The gold-haired imperial](http://flightrising.com/main.php?p=lair&id=2226&tab=dragon&did=46223529) from the Biskbrill crowd is standing beside the wagon, tall enough she's almost eye-to-eye with Buckshot sitting on the driver's bench. The sun trailing down from the miasma is good enough to catch in her hair, and light up the fresh cream of her hide deepening to wheat-gold on her face and hands. It's a striking sight, but that's not what Buckshot's eyes lock on: it's the brassy gold of the imperial's eyes, the colour all kinds of _wrong_ but the light behind them is all _right_.

“Buckshot,” the imperial says, in a quieter, calmer voice, and it's _her_ voice – Strawfoot's voice. Buckshot hasn't heard it in years and now all at once she realises just how much she missed the simple sound of it.

“State your business,” Buckshot says. Her voice has a little waver to it, but her hands are steady on the revolver.

“I – I've been looking for you,” Strawfoot says. She sounds almost confused, as if she's being forced to explain something that should be absurdly obvious to all involved. “This was the only place I could think to actually find you. I asked around town and they said you still got a stall here, sometimes, and --”

Buckshot breathes in hard through her nose. “ _What_ do you _want.”_

The imperial is quiet a moment. She stares long and hard at Buckshot's face with an expression that isn't – quite – readable. “I want to say sorry.”

“No, you don't,” Buckshot says. “You ain't her.”  
  
The imperial's face crumples a little at that. She starts to reach for Buckshot again, going slow, like she's about to try and calm a jumpy Wastebred.

Buckshot draws back on the hammer. “That'll do,” she says with a confidence she doesn't feel.

“I'm sorry,” the imperial says. She puts her hands up in a conciliatory gesture, and Buckshot takes leave of her senses long enough to look at the palms, and she can see the big old scars where the imperial had been injured, long ago, a lifetime ago, back when she'd found her wandering half-dead on the Road.

Buckshot had cleaned and wrapped those hands herself.

“You ain't _her_ ,” Buckshot says again, and she tries to put as much conviction in her voice as she can, but it's not much. The imperial – Buckshot does her level best not to think of her name even as it bangs with both fists on the back door of her mind – reaches for her again, still slow, and lightly touches fingertips to the muzzle of the gun. “She's disappeared an' – an'” – Buckshot's throat pulls tight, almost strangling her; wet stains her cheek – “an' _dead._ ”

The imperial gives her a sweet, sad smile. The same smile Buckshot's seen a hundred times, but only remembers the once; the same one she saw the night she'd been fool enough to propose to Strawfoot.

“Regulators found the coach,” Buckshot continues, almost against her own will. She'd never moved to try and follow Strawfoot after she left – doing so would've meant she couldn't accept Strawfoot's _no_ and she could, she had to, even though it hurt like hell. The Regulators' chief, Vanguard, had been the one to tell her about the coach found ground halfway to dust out in the Wasteland. They'd found some remains, too picked-over to really identify. _Nothing solid_ , Vanguard had said, and then, more quietly, eyes low: _But._

Buckshot had gotten the gist.

“I ran into trouble,” Strawfoot says. She pauses. “Like I always do when you're not around.” The smile this time gets that wry little twist to it, the one that used to always mean she was thinking about some stupid joke Buckshot told her, and it feels like hot metal pressing up under Buckshot's ribs, searing her heart.

Buckshot draws the nose of the revolver up sharply, shaking off Strawfoot's hand, aiming for the imperial's head. “If you're some kinda skin-stealin' goddamned _shit for brains_ wanderer wearing her, I _swear--”_

“Hell's goin' on over _here?_ ”

The voice is almost deafening; Buckshot realises that neither her nor Strawfoot have been speaking much louder than a whisper this whole time. She looks up and past Strawfoot's shoulder. Sherbrooke's trailed them out of Biskbrill, his blunt-nosed peacemaker in both hands . For all the bluster about his wares, Sherbrooke's never been fool enough to favour a blade over a gun in a pinch. He keeps the nose of the shotgun pointed down, but the uneasy energy in the way he's moving suggests he's ready to bring the business end to bear at a heartbeat's notice.

Sherbrooke gives the back of Strawfoot's head a quick, narrow-eyed once-over before lifting his gaze back up to Buckshot on the wagon. “You all right, Buck?”

Strawfoot doesn't turn right away; her eyes linger on Buckshot's face, her expression some inscrutable blend of sad and hopeful and something else Buckshot can't read. Slowly, she turns around enough to look at Sherbrooke.

“Hey, Sherly,” she says, and the tundra looks at her with eyes wide enough for Buckshot to pick out the green in them from this distance.

“Strawfoot?” he says, pronouncing the name very slowly, like he's only just able to remember it. “You – it's been a while.”

“Sure has.” Strawfoot's face is invisible to Buckshot from this angle, but the note of pain in her voice is clear. “You been keeping well?”

Sherbrooke glances between the two of them for a moment, unsure. When he looks back at Strawfoot, he gives a little smile and lets go of the muzzle of his gun long enough to give her a quick salute. “I'll let the lady be the judge of that.”

Strawfoot gives a laugh, then, which seems to surprise Sherbrooke as much as it does Buckshot. It's a clear, soft-edged sound, as rare and precious as clean water in the Wasteland to Buckshot's ears. She closes her eyes to drink in the sound of it, all at once feeling the tension bleed out of her. She lowers the revolver and thumbs the hammer back into place.

“Strawfoot,” Buckshot says. It's barely above a whisper, more of an exhalation of breath in the shape of the name, but the imperial turns around again all the same.

“At your service,” she says at once, and Buckshot feels the last doubt unhook its claws from her heart and retreat. It's a simple, silly phrase, with which Strawfoot had always answered when called. Never _Yes?_ Never _Need something?_ Always _At your service._

Buckshot climbs down off the wagon, so unsteady she almost falls – but Strawfoot's there, she's _really there_ , and she catches her easy as anything and holds her. Buckshot finds herself in an alcove of warm and gold as Strawfoot brings her wings in close to almost – but not quite – cloak her in softly translucent feathers.

“You've got _a lot_ of explainin' to do,” Buckshot murmurs into the imperial's shirt. Her cheek buzzes with the vibration of Strawfoot's soft laugh.

“Yeah, I do.”

They lapse into an easy silence for a moment, a silence broken only by the quiet sound of Sherbrooke clearing his throat. Buckshot disentangles herself from Strawfoot enough to look at him, and finds him looking – for perhaps the first time in all the time she's known him – slightly embarrassed. Nevertheless, the grin he flashes her is as bright and worry-free as ever.

“Who could use a drink?” he says. “ _I_ could use a drink. Let's go have a drink.”

“It's not even _noon_ ,” Strawfoot says, sounding politely scandalised.

“I'll buy,” Sherbrooke says, in a somewhat rough approximation of his salesman purr. The sound of something so typical in a thoroughly atypical situation makes Buckshot laugh out loud.

Strawfoot does not laugh, but she does drop the moralising pretense with an almost audible thump. “Deal,” she says. She doesn't have to turn around; Buckshot can hear the look of triumph on her face.

She reaches out and takes Buckshot's hand, and her palm is rough but warm and gentle, and when she gives Buckshot's hand a little tug to get them going in Sherbrooke's direction, Buckshot hasn't the slightest inclination to do anything but follow gladly along.


End file.
